ON October 6 2023 – a year ago today – Bushra Khalidi was celebrating her brother’s birthday.
It was a warm Friday night in Ramallah in the West Bank.
“We were all drinking – having a wonderful evening with friends. I remember it felt very wholesome,” she told The Sunday National.
Danielle Bett also remembers October 6 vividly.
The Israeli-Scot was also out celebrating a birthday – albeit for her best friend and in Jaffa, a port city near Tel Aviv.
“Really, nothing extraordinary in the evening – it was a fairly regular Friday,” she said.
October 6 was less celebratory for Fidaa Al-Araj, but it started off the same as any typical Friday.
The mother of six from Gaza City prepared a big family breakfast in the morning.
She then spent much of the rest of the day taking care of her two-year-old son – who was suffering from second degree burns from a spilt cup of hot coffee earlier in the week – and preparing him for minor surgery the next morning.
But that surgery, of course, would never come.
The Sunday National has spoken with three people - from Gaza, the West Bank and Israel – about how life has changed for them since Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack and the resulting war on Gaza.
Fidaa Al-Araj – Gaza
“I literally jumped out of bed, not knowing what was happening,” she said.
“The sounds of hundreds and hundreds of missiles from everywhere around us. People in the streets trying to figure out what was happening.”
The Oxfam aid worker then messaged her best friend and asked: “Is this a doomsday? Is it the end of the world? What’s happening?”
It took three-or-so hours before the picture became clearer as to the extent of what had happened.
Fidaa still found it difficult to wrap her mind around it. But she went straight into preparing mode anyway – stocking up on food and water at the supermarket, going to the cooking gas supplier, making sure they had an extra battery for the generator.
“There was this feeling that this is big,” she said. “That this was not going to pass.”
I heard from Fidaa for the first time via voicenote in the days that followed – which she told me had already felt like weeks as Israel bombarded Gaza City..
She said at the time: “I can't even sleep. I felt I was guarding their [my children’s] sleep. That, if I slept for a bit, something would happen.”
Fidaa and her children have, thankfully survived and now live, like many Palestinians, in the Al-Mawasi area of Rafah – the fourth place they have called home since first being displaced in late October last year.
She said that life has changed for Palestinians like her in many fundamental and obvious ways.
“The very basic fact of living in your own house is no longer possible. Almost everyone lives in tents, in camps. The whole scene in Gaza is tense, tense, tense,” she said.
“All of life’s essentials that we took for granted.”
Fidaa added, however, that it didn’t all start on October 7 of course.
“It's been like decades of Israeli occupation, of blockade, of restrictions on movement and the entry of goods. It was never easy to secure water,” she said.
“But not like this.
“Nothing remains. There is no school still standing, no hospital or clinic, no fucntions roads, no markets or shops,” she said – “just vendors set up on the street.”
Fidaa added: “Everything is makeshift, everything is temporary.”
She describes missing small things at times – like running water from a tap, a mattress on a floor and doors.
She asked: “Can you imagine a person missing doors?
“A regular old wooded door with a frame and a lock.”
She has also had to change and learn new skills – from getting used to not showering for weeks on end to cooking on an open fire rather than a stove and killing and defeathering a chicken.
“You just have to do this to survive.”
Fidaa tells The Sunday National that Palestinians in Gaza have, of course, changed as well.
Everyone has got used to being on “survival mode”, for example. Getting an evacuation order and having to pack up at a moment's notice has become second nature. Palestinians have also stopped planning for the future, which Fidaa says is “torure in its own way.
“There has also been a complete loss of privacy, a complete loss of individuality,” she said.
“The shape of community, the shape of society as we know it has drastically changed.
“If this war will ever end, no one will be the same. Nothing will be the same.”
She added that, one year on, people have also largely lost hope.
“Maybe we were hopeful a few months back, But now, even for me, it's very difficult to maintain that hope.
“Why would I? What would I hope for? All the pressure that's happening, all the solidarity. All the media attention and the popular attention to the Palestinian cause that we haven't been seen for years – it did nothing.
“One single patch of weapons from the US deployed to Israel wipes our lives out so easily.
“So what hope is left for us to have? No, I don't see any hope.”
Fidaa said, however, that she still hopes people still keep fighting for Palestinians.
“What I fear is that, one year on, it will stop being news,” she said, “One year passing on this war doesn't make it any easier. It doesn't make it any less violent.”
Danielle Bett – Israel
“I grew up In Israel and I've been here through various wars and conflicts and escalations,” she said.
“And usually there is kind of an advanced warning before anything happens.”
For this reason, she said the sirens came as a surprise – many even thought it was a mistake. There wasn’t even anything on the news.
Then, she got a message in her neighbourhood chat. It was from a young woman who was at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival, which was one of Hamas’s main targets that day.
“There's hundreds of people shooting at us,” Danielle’s neighbour wrote.
Some 364 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Hamas at the festival that day alone.
Then footage of the attacks started to circulate.
“A lot of people thought this must be fake because nothing like that had ever happened before,” Danielle said.
“It just seemed completely surreal.”
Tel Aviv was relatively unscathed from the attacks, but she said people were still too terrified to leave their homes.
“It was complete fear because suddenly everything you thought you knew about this conflict had collapsed.
“Every concept you had of what the red lines of security were, had collapsed.
“And this is all happening an hour, or an hour and a half, away from you. That's not that far away, so it was really terrifying.”
In total, the 7 October attacks killed 1,195 people, with a further 251 taken hostage.
A spokesperson for Yachad – a left-wing British Jewish organisation fighting for a political resolution between Israel and Palestine – Danielle said it has very much changed both Israeli society and its people – but that has also changed over time.
“The immediate response to October 7 was obviously the desire to close the border and go to war,” she said.
“But people are also going through a process of trauma, of anxiety – a kind of recalibration of what they believed because this conflict has been managed for a very long time and it has very clearly failed everyone.”
Danielle added that the thing that has affected people the most is the issue of the hostages.
“It's very easy for us to imagine as these are very ordinary people, be it the people who were at the festival or people living in their homes. It really feels like it could be any of us.
“And the idea that you could be held as an ordinary civilian and that your government will not do absolutely everything that it can to get you out is really terrifying.
“Which you can see by the mass protests for the release of the hostages and the pressure that's being put on the government.”
Danielle also said that it’s difficult for Israelis to understand much of the criticism from abroad.
“For one, the media here doesn't show us what's happening in Gaza to the full extent. Every now and then there's a little bit, but there's not a real discussion of it,” she said.
“There isn't a full picture of what's happening in Gaza. So I think people struggle to understand. They feel that they're hated by the world.”
Danielle added: “And I think it's right to criticise the Israeli government and the IDF but it needs to be separated from still allowing the humanity towards Israelis who have gone through trauma that most people in the West can't imagine.”
She went on: “Advocating for the release of hostages doesn't stop anyone from advocating for Palestinian human rights or for a ceasefire.
“Those things shouldn't counteract one another. We're kind of being placed as Israelis and Palestinians in a competition of suffering.
“I have no problem acknowledging that clearly, the situation is much worse in Gaza than it is here, but that doesn't mean that you can't acknowledge suffering for Israelis.
“We don't need to be pitted against each other in competition. There's plenty of hate in this region. We don't need more fuel added to it.”
Bushra Khalidi – The West Bank
She remembers the exact time – 7:10am.
“[My husband] he's a personal trainer. So, he was wearing his sports clothes to go to work. And he was saying, ‘Bushra there's a war.’ “And I said – ‘what are you talking about?’”
Bushra added: “The war hadn't started, but he knew what the implications of what happened on October 7th were because he's from Gaza, he’s lived in Gaza – he knew what this meant.”
The Oxfam spokesperson previously spoke with The National about settlers trying to take her family home in the West Bank.
“[The settlers] claimed they had purchased the property,” she told me, explaining that the family are now in an ongoing court case – with the settlers presenting “forged papers”.
The West Bank – a Palestinian territory between Israel and Jordan that was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and has been occupied ever since – has been described at the second front of the war in Gaza.
This is because, as Israel’s war on Gaza continues, extremist settlers have been exploiting the lack of global attention on the territory to expel Palestinians from their land – often aided and funded by the Israeli government.
So, while not experiencing the same level of devastation seen in Gaza, the West Bank and those who live there have also changed and been impacted by October 7.
“It’s entirely different. The first thing for me at a personal level is I don't plan anything – and I’m the biggest planner,” she said.
“Because everything is unexpected and anything may kick off, everything is so volatile. It's actually extremely debilitating. You don't know what the checkpoint is going to be open or closed.”
She added that she is lucky to be working for a company like Oxfam.
“Most Palestinians are in areas that are vulnerable to settler attacks. They live near settlements. They have lost their jobs or their businesses because their permits were revoked by Israel.
“300,000 Palestinians are out of a job [in the West Bank]. It's a huge amount of the population that has no income at the moment.
“There's over 700 checkpoints that basically dictate our entire lives.”
Bushra hit out at Western governments failing to do enough to pressure Israel – both in Gaza and the West Bank.
“It really is, in my view, complicity at its finest.
“We've seen sanctions which are very welcome. But it doesn't really address the root causes of this. It doesn’t address the systemic violence that we experience every single day.
She added: “It's the complete dehumanisation of Palestinians. We've always been and will always stay numbers.
“We don't have faces, we don't have names. The feeling amongst the Palestinians is that their lives matter less than others. And we've seen it in how things are reported.
We're seeing it on how politicians are reacting to different incidents in the last 10 months.
Bushra asked: “Where is the humanity of our elected officials?
“The global solidarity movement has been very clear on Palestine. I think any normal human being doesn't want children to die.
“I think everybody is aligned on that except for our elected officials who are not heeding the call of their constituents in any way whatsoever.
“Instead, it's geopolitical interests and their own agendas that have been prioritised.”
